Some implications of being undone by music a response to Christopher Ballantine

Discourses can be restrictive and totalitarian. They categorise experiences, hunches, and thoughts in single concepts (such as history, power, gender or identity), and they operate as regimes that excommunicate deviant discursive behaviour. In the long nineteenth century, the age of historicism, for example, it was very hard for academics to explain forms of human action and agency as functioning independently from a linear and progressivist ‘history’. In the era of emancipation, ‘gender’ – later expanded to ‘identity’ – became the inescapable benchmark for almost all critical thought and research about human interaction, including music. In the age of poststructuralism/postmodernism/postcolonialism, it is the concept of ‘power’ that dictates the terms of discussion. These concepts function accumulatively, like Russian matryoshka dolls: power encapsulates identity which encapsulates gender which encapsulates history. This makes them uncomfortably heavy, at times.